A diver works to remove invasive milfoil from Long Pond in Belgrade. Divers using vacuum devices are most effective in combating the weed, but the work is costly.

That’s not quite how local lakes associations are putting it, but as they ask area towns to help fund a fierce war against an invasive plant, the connection between the money and lake health is clear.

The enemy is milfoil, a quick-growing, quick-spreading weed that runs rampant over native plants and has no natural predators. Left unchecked, it fills shorelines with mats of thick, green fronds that render a lake unsuitable for swimming or boating.

Lakes groups like the Belgrade Regional Conservation Alliance and the Belgrade Lakes Association are leading the charge against milfoil in the Belgrade-area lake system.

By Tom Abare (’15) and Ben Timm ( ’14) This summer as members of the Belgrade Lake’s Sustainability Project Research Team, we have been investigating the effects of best management practices (BMPs) for developed shoreline lots on the species diversity and abundance of macroinvertebrate communities of the Belgrade lakes. These organisms vary in their tolerance to…

By Marianne Ferguson ’14, Savannah Judge ’15, Sarah Large ‘14 As you may have seen in previous blog posts, Colby College recently deployed a high frequency monitoring buoy into Great Pond, affectionately known as Goldie, that relays environmental data to the website http://web.colby.edu/lakes/ every 15 minutes. Two features of this buoy are the photosynthetically active…

Tom Abare (’15, Colby College) collecting sediment sample By Gian Perani (’14, Colby College) Quantifying the effects of buffering lakefront property has been the priority of the research group led by Russ Cole and Cathy Bevier this summer. Surveys of littoral and riparian zones have confirmed that residential properties with at least a buffer strip,…